StatCan Research Beat: Who are the working women in the top 1%?
Catalogue number: Catalogue number: 89-20-0004
Issue number: 2019001
Release date: January 28, 2019
StatCan Research Beat – Who are the working women in the top 1%? - Transcript
(The Statistics Canada symbol and Canada wordmark appear on screen with the title: "StatCan Research Beat – Who are the working women in the top 1%?")
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(Text on screen below presenter: "Elizabeth Richards, Senior Research Economist.")
Working women are now more educated than working men, yet they continue to be outnumbered at the top of the income distribution. In 2015, women represented one in five workers in the top 1%. Research shows that the lack of women in top income groups explains about half of the gender pay gap in Canada.
- Who are the women reaching top income groups? And
- How do they differ from men in the same income bracket?
In this edition of StatCan's Research Beat, we'll go over some key findings from a recent study – a first gender-based analysis of workers in the top 1% in Canada. Essentially, based on 2016 Census data, there were some key differences between working women and men with a total income of about $270,000 or more.
Let's start with occupation. Major occupations for top income groups include business leaders, senior managers, physicians and lawyers. But, were women and men just as likely to be senior managers or physicians?
Women in the top 1% were almost twice as likely as their male counterparts to work in health, mainly as physicians. One in five women in the top 1% worked in health, compared to one in nine men.
Women in the top 1% were about three times less likely than their male counterparts to work in natural and applied sciences, representing one in thirty women, compared to about one in ten men.
Even though women in the top 1% were more likely than their male counterparts to work in business, they were less likely to work in management, especially at senior levels. Given that women were also less represented among top income groups, they represented one in seven managers in the top 1%.
Their families also looked different. Working women in the top 1% were less likely than their male counterparts to have a married spouse or a common-law partner. They were also somewhat less likely to have children and when they did, they had fewer children.
These family dynamics influenced the number of hours worked. Core-aged women in the top 1% with one or two children worked about 42 hours, 5 hours less than their male counterparts. However, core-aged women and men in the top 1% without children worked similar hours.
Even though women in the top 1% were more educated than their male counterparts, they had lower incomes. Income gaps were wider in senior management and business occupations, while they were narrower in health, where salaries are typically more influenced by government policies.
So what does this mean?
Well, women have taken a different path than men in reaching top income groups. And even at the top of the income distribution, women were making less money.
By understanding the characteristics of women in the top 1%, we can better understand the barriers in breaking those glass ceilings. Stay tuned for more information on this topic through new analytical products.
Thank you.
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